The other evening, coming home on BART, I saw a beautiful young tranny in the Berkeley station. She was talking on the payphone while waiting for the train to the City. It was her voice that made me pay attention as I passed. She appeared to be 19 or 20, maybe not even that old. Seeing her, hearing her, triggered a number of memories and thoughts. Her faux fur jacket reminded me of the first woman's jacket I bought for myself. I was then about the same age as she appeared to be now. I had gone to a little consignment shop on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. The area around 14th and Peachtree was changing. The hippie scene had diminished since the bad summer of 1970. This was my first real drag shopping excursion. I remember my mixture of nervousness and excitement, and how friendly and sympathetic the saleswoman seemed to me.
It's funny to be in one's fifties and to still possess a sense of discomfort about your gender identity. I usually can channel my discomfort into an, if-not-positive, at least emotionally neutral, space where I can at-least-be-with-it. That night I felt a little twinge of jealously as well, probably not disconnected from her youth and my age, as well as the fact that she looked much better in her jacket than I remember me ever looking in mine.
[27 November 2004] link?
how the web has changed for me
I have been writing a little more than usual. Every once in a while, I think I have something to say and I actually say it. I often think about how technology has changed things, is changing things, for better and for worse. I think email has both opened up a feeling of connectedness, made communication more effortless, and at the same time tended to make the communication shallower. It certainly has made me more of a shallow reader, just out of self-defence, just to deal with the volume of email demanding attention. I have to remind myself to read deeper, indeed, to read the whole document if it's from someone that I am interested in communicating with.
And, it's not only the issue of how technology has changed our world, but also about how our use of the technology has altered how we experience the technology itself.
For instance, I still remember my excitement at getting onto the web. Everyday brought some new revelation. Who would have ever thought that you could find this this information here. Come over here, look at that!
But for all the newness and seemingly endless richness of my early experience, I still had but a few regular places that I traveled everyday. Macintouch was one. Scripting News another. A few more.
I can't remember the last time I visited Macintouch. Having gone over to the Windows world a few years back (with a little linux on the side), I am rarely called upon to search out Mac resources. But Macintouch, I am happy to report, is still there, and seems to be the same great resource. I am still a regular reader of Scripting News, but I rarely read it as deeply as I did in the days of DaveNet, circa 1996-1997. What I do know is that I can't really write about how the web has changed for me without also writing about how the web has changed me, or at least something in me. And for me, that change was the realization of how you could in a very public way, put out your own personal opinion, put out your own very personal reflections, put it out into an unknown territory, and gracefully, perhaps sometimes painfully, take back in the feedback from readers, engaging in a natural and organic dialogue. And I think the exemplar of that - for me - was Dave Winer's early writing.
I have come across others, later, who have become models for me in my writing. One of them is (hopefully) enjoying a holiday vacation with family at this very moment.
Of course the difference between Dave Winer's writing and mine is also the difference between someone with an audience and someone who has an occasional vistor. Regardless, I know that for me, the initial inspiration to write publicly, indeed to have this website, was inspired by such DaveNet columns as "The Perfect Parent" and "Proof that You Exist". A brief digression about the latter. I was the man with the bright eyes at the BMUG event. My 15 nano-seconds of internet fame. I've always been a bit bashful at making comments at public events, so I waited until the end, because I just had to say thanks. "The Perfect Parent" was one of those "oh wow" experiences for me and I still see it as a moving piece of web exposition...or how about just a damn fine bit of personal writing? Thank you, again, Dave Winer.
[24 November 2004] link?
Last night I met up with my friend K for an excellent meal at Little Plearn, then walked across Shattuck to see What the Bleep Do We Know". It seems to have gained something of an instant cult status, confirmed, I contend, by the number of people there to see it on a Tuesday night.
The film had received a rave recommendation from another friend, and while I thought it interesting, and in parts entertaining and thought provoking, and watching Marlee Matlin is always enjoyable, it really didn't set my pants on fire.
Mostly, I found it to be too busy, both visually and in terms of content, and overly long. I think it would have been more digestible for me as a series of half-hour PBS-style shows, a cross between Nova and Zoom. But then, that's not what the well-intentioned folks who made this movie did. So there.
[24 November 2004] link?
norcross high school incantations
The high school years were not pleasant ones for me. Struggling with my own sexuality, with few real close friends until my last year, amid all the racial and political dramas that played themselves out in the 1960's, did not make an experience, or set of experiences, likely to evoke nostalgic feelings later in life.
Now that I am later in life, er, much later in life, with this year marking the 35th anniversary of my high school graduation, I suddenly feel free to put out the names of several people I would love to hear from. In the fantasy-of-the-moment in which I am writing this, I am imagining a gigantic army of web-bots harvesting these names and calling out to them as they google norcross high school, or norcross+high+school+class+1969, or norcross, georgia or even as they google their own names: Lamar Dailey. Patricia Dailey. Susan Johnson. Susan I met in 7th grade, the first year I went to school in Norcross. I thought we were pretty close in 8th grade and then as often happens, we drifted apart throughout our high school years. Okay. I had a major, major crush on her. I heard from her once in the late seventies. I think she had married by then and had a different last name. Lamar and Patricia are brother and sister. I met them the year Norcross High School was integrated, so that would be around 1967. Lamar sat behind me in political science class. I felt like he knew my heart. Patricia was my only date in high school. On the night of our graduation, Patricia and I sat in the back of Lamar's car and kissed necked under a blanket, while Lamar, driving, sat with his date in front. I saw her a few times after high school but we lost touch. I morphed into an 14th Street dwelling baby acid-head, she into a college student. I last saw her on Peachtree Street, walking with a boyfriend, her hair in a big afro, looking beautiful. I can't remember if she saw me.
So then this really is a kind of an incantation piece. I am calling out to you through the ether, hoping that you all are paying attention and will care to respond. I am listening, my ears to the ether.
[23 November 2004] link?
I took my grandson to school this morning and then walked over to the post office and picked up the certified letter that was waiting for me. It was a death notice from probate court back in Georgia, regarding my late first cousin. I was expecting it. My sister had called me several weeks ago to confirm my address. Since I am hardly ever home during the week, a certified letter requiring my signature meant that I would have to go in to the El Cerrito post office to pick it up. I am usually at work long before they open and home long after they close, so taking the grandson to school was convenient.
I hadn't been in touch with my first cousin in many years. Fortunately, my sister had kept in close contact. She's good about keeping in touch with family. I'm terrible. He was almost a decade older than I was. I never knew his mom, my mother's older sister, as she died (I believe) before I was born. He was a favourite relative. I have fond memories of him bringing Hershey bars as treats while we watched the annual showing of "The Wizard of Oz" on CBS. My mother loved him very much, and he her.
About a week ago I googled his name and came up with a death notice in the on-line Atlanta Journal & Constitution. It included a photo, one from a number of years ago, perhaps even from the time before I moved away. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and a trucker's cap jauntily perched on his head. My first cousin. A good guy.
[23 November 2004] link?
"Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behavior that is adjusted, by (preferably) non-injurious torture. In the best places, where straitjackets are abolished, doors are unlocked, leucotomies largely foregone, these can be replaced by more subtle lobotomies and tranquillizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient. Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal''adjusted'state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."
- R. D. Laing, September 1964
[19 November 2004] link?
"I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine. This past week almost 60 million of our so-called "fellow" Americans voted against us. Indeed 23% of self-identified gay people voted against us, too. That one I can't figure."
"There is never one single hour that a disenfranchised minority does not have to fight to breathe and stay alive. The hate out there will never lessen. It only grows and grows, this hate. Most of you refuse to face this. I hate you for your doing that. I really do. I have no more patience for this kind of weakness. I know this is uncharitable of me. I don't care. I am too tired of fighting with so few troops. You are now dancing your own dance of death, you know. And I hate you for this, too. Grow up, I beg you. Oh, grow up."
"How do we fight as a united front when they don't approve of our "behavior" and when our behavior is inseparable from our beings? How do we fight as a united front when some of us won't or are unable to change certain behaviors that many of us have difficulty in supporting and defending ourselves? We've been so concerned about showing the world a united front. We feel the need to say that everything gay people do is good and it simply isn't so. We must have an honest discussion amongst ourselves about what's good and what isn't. This is of course the problem that has finally brought us down because we have refused to deal with it, and perhaps is one reason today's youngsters have difficulty in acknowledging our past. It is the unfaced devil in our closet, if you will, that we have refused to deal with and which, now, now that they have achieved their position of imperial power, will be used to hang us once and for all. To be crude about it, how do we market and sell our wishes and our needs as they have been able to package and sell their wants and needs so successfully for thirty-five years? How do we frame this issue? How do we claim the God that they have subsumed into their own ownership? It is inhuman to think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side is by policing each other and in so doing destroy whatever hope we have of getting along? If they have been able to convince this country that the Republicans are the party of the people, surely so many sons and daughters can be smart enough to find a way to sell our parents permission to co-exist."
"I do not know how to answer any of this. And I don't think anyone among us does either. To talk out loud about what our bodies have done and continue to do is asking for trouble from others of us. How do we admit our past, own it, and evolve from it and move on? For we must do this."
I am still digesting Larry Kramer's recent speech. Many thanks to RuPaul for making it available.
[16 November 2004] link?
The other day I got a chance to watch Peter Robinson's 1971 documentary Asylum. Filmed at the Archway Community in London, a place set up by R.D. Laing and colleagues as a place where people in mental and emotional distress could just be, it makes fascinating viewing, not least because over the past thirty plus years since, mental health providers-and policy makers-have mostly ignored, or misunderstood, or misrepresented, what Laing and company were getting at in terms of dealing with the human dimensions, human-to-human, of people in mental and emotional distress.
I would have liked to see extras for the DVD, but then again, I'm grateful that Kino Video saw fit to release it at all. A quick google brought up some articles, including an interview with Leon Redler, who appears in the film in a much younger, wild-haired model of himself. If you have time, you can check out the Janus Head special issue of several years back, which focused on the life and work of Laing. You can also make it to your local seller of fine dvds, and buy a copy of Asylum. It's well worth a look. And if you're a good enough friend, I might even lend you mine.
[15 November 2004] link?
Carter Tomassi over at Messy Optics continues to stoke the fires of my curiosity. Each time I visit his site, I'm reminded of my flower child coming of age years in Atlanta, selling the Great Speckled Bird at the corner of 14th Street and Peachtree, hanging out on the Strip, listening to the house band of Piedmont Park, the Allman Brothers, and lurking around Atlantis Rising.
When I turned 18 in the fall of 1969, I promptly moved into a house on 14th Street, 44 14th Street. I found a job at Georgia Tech, as a janitor, but not without being told at first that I was over qualified...since I had graduated from high school.
I met many special people during that time, a few that I'm still in occasional touch with. There are many, however, that I have no clue as to where their life paths have taken them since those days...one of them usually wore a purple cloak. We knew her as Purple Judy.
When I met her, she was working in one of the shops that was part of Atlantis Rising. I think that at one time she lived in one of the houses on 14th. I never knew her very well. We said hello on the street. As I recall, she was the daughter of a well-known Atlanta eye surgeon. She did arrange for her father to donate his talents to benefit a little girl in our house who was afflicted with strabismus.
I often wonder what happened to many of the people I knew from that time. I know that Rod is in Tennesee. Bob is in the mountains of New Mexico. Larry is somewhere in Northern California. Curry in Colorado. Barbara is currently in Sweden. Carter Tomassi is right here in Berkeley! But...where is Purple Judy?
[14 November 2004] link?
Last month, Helen Chenoweth-Hage attempted to board a United Airlines flight from Boise to Reno when she was pulled aside by airline personnel for additional screening, including a pat-down search for weapons or unauthorized materials...
"She said she wanted to see the regulation that required the additional procedure for secondary screening and she was told that she couldn't see it," local TSA security director Julian Gonzales told the Idaho Statesman...
..."Why couldn't they at least let her see that?" asked Statesman commentator Dan Popkey.
"Because we don't have to," Mr. Gonzales replied crisply.
"That is called 'sensitive security information.' She's not allowed to see it, nor is anyone else," he said.
The above is for those who wonder what the fuss was all about over four more years for the folks who brought us John Ashcroft and company. You can read the complete article in the latest issue of Steven Aftergood's invaluable "Secrecy News".
Yes, I know. There is no guarantee that the other side wouldn't be doing the same. Alas.
[14 November 2004] link?
"On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. 'Well, I learned a lot,' he told reporters on Air Force One. 'You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries.' It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him 'a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy', and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting 'a bum rap' from human rights organisations for his military's campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala's elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children."
Thus begins Corey Robin's review in the London Review of Books of Greg Grandin's "The Last Colonial Massacre" a chilling reminder of the costs of the late Cold War.
[14 November 2004] link?
a minor interruption for a short short rant or why I'm boycotting Landmark Theatres Sony Classics
The new Almodóvar, "Bad Education", is being released on Friday. It's not slated to open until December 22 at the Clay in San Francisco, I'm not sure when it will open in the Bay Area, although there is an advance screening set for December 20. I'm not sure who's responsible. Maybe I should also avoid any Sony Pictures Classics films until after I have my Almodóvar fix. This seems to happen everytime there is a new Almodóvar film. We in the Bay Area have to wait just a little bit longer to see it. That, as the Greeks might say, sucks! I could say more, but none of it would be nice.
[14 November 2004] link?
Last night an unusual occurrence. I met up with bc at Comic Relief. She scored a few comics for her grandson. I bought the final installment of "TransMetropolitan" and stood in line to have it signed by the redoutable Warren Ellis. He was there in support for the store, which is in the process of being evicted and is looking for a new location. Thanks to Warren Ellis for letting us know what's going down in our own community!
Also in attendance was the fantastic young artist, Lauren McCubbin, looking fantastically alt-glamorous. Wished I had acted on my impulse to buy another copy of "Rent Girl" and ask her to sign it!
Afterwards, we strolled down to attend a benefit for Housing Rights. We hung out with friends, drank a gin and tonic each, ate the spice-less afghani food and retreated into the night towards our respective homesteads.
[5 November 2004] link?